What's more, I can't help but think that you already had your mind made up about Kanotix long before you installed the OS. You could have at least asked a few questions in the proper forum or joined us in irc.
Absolutely not!!!

but after all the posts about how successful upgrades were with Kanotix I really was disappointed to have such extreme problems. The sed problem may have been a Debian broken package issue& it may have been 'fixed' but it still was a problem. I searched the posts at http://kanotix.mipooh.net/ & found the relevant post but the solution Kano presented (insure that the kanotix sources were in sources list) was no help; the sources were there so the corrected package should have been the one I got. I could not post on the Kanotix board, I had only just registered & it was some time before the activation came through. I assume this would apply to irc also (ie...unresgistered).
Once again, I absolutely had no prejudgements about Kanotix. But I did have expectations. One of these was that it would survive an upgrade better than Knoppix. and it did not. I have done an upgrade on Knoppix-style install of Knoppix 3.4. Other than a couple of package problems & the plethora of installed services, it came through relatively unscathed. This may have been a rare incident, however. I tried the same on Knoppix 3.3 & the system was trashed. This time, Kanotix was trashed.

Unless the search function at kanotix.com is broken I see that you have made only one post there and it wasn't a question.
True. I have been registered with that forum for only a couple of days. And there was no point asking the question; it had already been asked.

4) As expected, upgrade results in every conceivable service starting up at boot...including nis which takes about 2 minutes to get through the boot. Only solution appears to be manually sys-V-init remove all these services immediately following upgrading. Upgrade really should be revised to leave your runlevel service settings alone.

Again this is a Debian issue. Had you joined #kanotix and asked our friendly robot Sonya a question you could have had the answer for this in a matter of seconds.
I realize this is a Debian issue. That comment is not intended as a criticism of Kanotix and yes, that is what I have done (removed nis). I will edit the comment out of the post if you wish.
Sonya's response does raise the question though. If the nis package is a risk and the best advice is to remove it, why is it included in the first place?

3) Upgrading. Sad to say, but it's pretty much the same story as Knoppix....upgrading breaks it.
You need to do a Debian type installation if you want to have Debian. A knoppix type install gives exactly what you ask for, a knoppix type install that will break if you try to upgrade it.
and the very next thing I did was do a Debian install & broke it.

I was doing Knoppix style installs because 1) All I need is a single user system which Knoppix is 2) I was using it as a base for remastering and 3) I like and can follow the startup sequence via knoppix scripts.

You were also remastering from HD installs. Was this from a Debian type install?

I don't really understand why Knoppix style install would be so different with regard to upgrade anyway, the main differences are in the startup sequence and the user permissions; these shouldn't really have that much effect on installing new packages.

Reiser is IMHO a fantastic filesystem than is not only faster than ext3 but is also very stable. That said, I've had no such issues selecting ext3 instead of reiser. If you can verify that as a bug then report it.
I've at least one more install to attempt. If it happens again I will report it.

Bear in mind that there is no option to install GRUB from the GUI in Knoppix. In fact, I am not sure if Knoppix can install GRUB. Kanotix uses GRUB so it is no suprise that GRUB is part of the installation. You can't fairly and objectively judge a boot loader by a one time attempted installation/use.
OK, this should have been a wish list item instead of sounding like a bug. I've nothing against grub, it's just that lilo does what I want it to & I'm used to it.

Have I mentioned that Kanotix has great support?
# kanotix 21:12 < mzilikazi> anyone knows why the installer fails from text mode?
# kanotix 21:12 < Kano> mzilikazi: dialog is too old, will not occur with bhx
And there you have it. Fixed!
Doesn't help if you have BH9. The real objective of this try-out-a-new distro exercise is so I won't have to continually reinstall the next version to keep up to date and out of bugs. I am reluctant to frequently reinstall since both Knoppix & Kano are total package installs & I have to do considerable customizing following installation to get what I want.

Oh yes: one more minor item: Net connection is gone. Seems to have found the pcmcia netcard but cannot ping anything.
I too had the same problem with networking. All one needs to do is restart your networking once and it is not an issue.
I think I tried that but configure networking wouldn't work. Can't check now, I have reinstalled (beginner style just to try them all) as there were so many problems that reinstall was far easier.
And another: After crtl-alt-f2 console, cannot resartx, cannot login as user and cannot shutdown. No response from 'shutdown -h now' as root. Big red button time.
Sounds like a system lockup to me. Did you reboot and try again? Let me stress however that it is important that you upgrade in the proper way as mentioned above.
Yes it was. and rebooting did not help.
I did
Code:
dselect update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
This was done from konsole. I have not seen any dire warnings about upgrading from gui-konsole and I have 'upgraded' half the world via 'apt-get -t unstable install' (including kde appas like kdebase) from konsole without problem so I cannot believe that would be the major problem. However next time I will be sure to try from console login.

Trying yet again. possibly crashing yet again.